'Is it because...?' A self-diagnosis
“ ‘Is it because…?’ A Self-Diagnosis ”
As a writer, I have many vices. Far too many, in fact, for me to go into too much detail here. But I’m sure that you can guess what a few of them are. Booze. Nicotine. A primal attraction to dangerous situations. However, none of these compare to my ability to procrastinate doing the work that I know I should be doing, like writing. As my friend Jessica so aptly points out in her new blog Instead of Writing, I…, writers are notorious for their ability to put off actually writing in favor of, say, more fun things. Like trolling the internet. Or binge watching all of the episodes of House, MD on Netflix. What we’re not so great at doing is forcing ourselves to sit down with a pen and paper, or a typewriter, or a laptop to actually do what the muses have called us to do. In this regard, I am no different than any of my peers; perhaps with the exception of my other friend Sarah, who sits down every day to work on some piece or project that she’s had going for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. The world and my imagination are, simply put, just too interesting to ignore (as many of my writer friends would agree). Now you would think such a stunning realization would fuel my creativity. On the contrary. Often times it stifles it. I experience sensory overload on a daily basis; and yet, I struggle to put those thoughts, observations, and interactions into words. Why? Because….ooh, look at that squirrel over there! I rest my case.
Looking back on this blog and what I’ve actually written for it, I am woefully underwhelmed with how it, a tool I created in order to break free from the irons of writers’ block, has, itself, become yet another example of how extremely skilled I have become at procrastinating the doing of things that actually matter to me. About a year and a half ago, I found myself sitting at a cafe in Miami with my adoptive mother, discussing how I couldn’t seem to produce anything worthwhile (or even anything that could even pass itself off as half-decent). She suggested that I create a blog, for no-one in particular. Just a blog, something to write about, so that I could have an outlet for my thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
“Feelings. Blegh. Those are the things you accidentally fall into when you aren’t paying attention to your surroundings. They’re what cause problems. And then you have to deal with those problems, or they become bigger problems. It’s a vicious chocolate and vanilla swirl of doom.”
However, in the time since I’ve planted my flag on this little plot of cyber-space real estate (props if you made the disjointed logical leap to a pop culture reference), I’ve come to realize that on some level she was right. We all need an outlet, no matter what we do or where our passions lie. So what is it that causes passionate people to put their passions on the back burner, so to speak? Life? The Internet? Everything? I’ll be the first to admit that George Takei’s postings do take up a lot of my time when I’m not at work; or when I’m not out and about doing “research.” And by research, I mean hanging out at a bar, drinking cheap beer and taking shots of even cheaper bourbon.
But back to the question at hand. Why do we procrastinate? See even now, I’m doing it. What I don’t lack is a routine, which, as Jessica pointed out, can sometimes become cumbersome, and in some cases, result in a case of writers’ block as impenetrable as a Greek Phalanx. What I do lack is confidence in my own ability to write something worthwhile, something substantial, or something that will one day matter. Poems that, as my mentor Lisa Russ Spaar is so fond of saying, “…are so good that you feel as though the top of your head has been taken off by the time you finish reading them."
Mine isn’t a problem of procrastinating for procrastinations sake; it’s a problem of trying so hard to write my masterpiece before it's due, that my artistic self-deprecation has been running at critical mass for so long, that it’s turned into self-destruction far before my time. I have taken Hemingway’s mantra of “Write drunk. Edit sober” and combined it with T.S. Elliot’s neurosis to create a volatile combination. Whether or not that quotation can actually be attribute to Hemingway is neither here nor there. It’s the sentiment behind it that counts.
In my own writing, I find that, more and more, I have to slip into alternate states of consciousness in order to generate material. It’s a slippery slope. And what’s even more worrisome to me is that I often feel I reached the pinnacle of my creativity during the four years that I spent as a student at U.Va. That was around the same time that I discovered the poet Tom Andrews’ lyric sequence of Unfilmable Films: poems written in the form of screenplays that increase in either absurdity or psycho-terror, until “…surely even Tim Burton would throw up his hands at this point in the script…” It’s even my belief that I have spent far too much time as a denizen of Ashbury Land — an amusement park, located on a heath somewhere in the British Isles, that features an impressively stellar array of psychotropic rides.
What happens next, you may ask? Unfortunately, I do not have an answer to that question. Either I’ll hit a major breakthrough in the not-too-distant future; or they’ll find me alone in my apartment, wearing a white dress, sexually repressed, and writing poems about how sexually repressed I am. At this point, the only detail missing from this scene is the white dress.
Which brings me back to my original question: why don’t I write more? What, exactly, is standing in my way? In many regards, it’s my own conviction that what I imagine isn’t good enough; and yet, in others, it’s a more deeply rooted question that is linked to an assumption that the scope of my obsessions (love, sex, the divine, ecstasy) are too narrow, in the sense that I focus on my experiences as a gay man; growing up in the South; coming out in a small town; and then finding myself while attending a university that, at times, can simultaneously be a bastion of liberal thought and conservative idealism.
And so I’m led to the conclusion that mine is not an issue of skill, or really a lack of self-confidence in my abilities as a writer; but rather an inability to face myself; an unwillingness to come to terms with my reality; and an aversion to indicting society on the grounds of what I see as unjust for fear of the inevitable backlash. But isn’t that the principal function of writing, of all art?
For me, what is needed is an injunction against fear, judgement, and criticism.
Recently, I finished Louise Glück’s collection, Vita Nova. I would like to leave you with just one poem (of many), relevant to this essay:
I stood at the gate of a rich city.
I had everything the gods required;
of preparation had been long.
And the moment was the right moment,
the moment assigned to me.
The moment was the right moment;
the words trembled that were
the right words. Trembled —
and I knew that if I failed to answer
quickly enough, I would be turned away.
— Louise Glück, Vita Nova
